Blood Ambush by Sheila Johnson Page B

crime, pulling her hair up and stuffing it under a black baseball cap, then wearing a big sweater with a hood pulled over the cap. She was also wearing a surgical mask over her face. Schiess, she said, didn’t wear any sort of disguise.
    She had wanted to tell Vernon what had happened, and that they hadn’t meant to hurt Darlene, she claimed. Then she said that she had asked Schiess after the murder if he was worried that they would be caught by law enforcement, and he said that he wasn’t.
    “He said that he has a genius IQ, and that lawyers made Cs in college and police made Cs in high school.”
    It was a great deal of satisfaction to the “C-student” police officers present at the interview to know they had been given so much incriminating testimony against their two suspects, due to Barbara’s making such a detailed and lengthy statement.

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    After the conclusion of her first interview, at around 7:50 P.M. , Barbara Roberts told the officers she knew where the missing black Dodge Dakota had been hidden. She voluntarily agreed to escort the GBI agents to the location of Schiess’s pickup truck. Thanks to the papers found in Schiess’s satchel that had been confiscated at the airport at the time of their arrest, the investigators already were relatively certain they knew where the truck was parked, but corroboration from one of the suspects would add greatly to the importance of the evidence.
    Barbara told the investigators that the truck was, indeed, located at Aaron & Montana Self Storage, and Barbara gave them the gate code and storage unit number. When the officers checked with the manager of the storage facilities, they were provided with records to the unit in question, A-66, which indicated that it had been leased to Robert John Schiess on April 8. The key to the lock on the unit, Barbara told them, was on a key ring that was inside the Schiess apartment, and she gave SA Jack Vickery her verbal consent to retrieve the key. Vickery went to the apartment and quickly found the key ring Barbara had described.
    That night, at around eleven forty-five, SA Brian Johnston went to the home of Rockdale County Superior Court judge David Irwin to get his approval for a search warrant for the Aaron & Montana Self Storage Unit A-66, and the seizure of a black Dodge Dakota pickup truck, bearing VIN number 1B7GL22X7SS236977 and registered to Dr. Robert John Schiess III, which was believed to be parked inside the unit. After reviewing Johnston’s affidavit giving information on the case and the investigators’ reasons for believing the truck to be inside the storage unit in question, Judge Irwin signed the search warrant order and the warrant was executed at midnight.
    After trying all the keys on the key ring that SA Vickery had brought from the apartment, police saw that none of them opened the storage unit. The Rockdale County Fire Department had to be contacted to come to the facility and cut the lock off the unit before it could be opened. When the door to the unit was finally rolled up that evening after midnight, and the waiting group of officers got their first look inside, the 1999 black Dodge Dakota pickup truck sat there—just as they had suspected, and as Barbara Roberts had told them it would be.
    The investigators moved in and began photographing the truck from every angle and doing a preliminary check for evidence, and Milstead Wrecker Service was called to move the truck from Aaron & Montana Self Storage to a secure storage area at the Rockdale County Sheriff’s Office. There, it would undergo crime scene processing, and would yield even more evidence in the murder of Darlene Roberts.

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    The news of the two arrests in the Darlene Roberts murder case was the big story in all the area media, when it was confirmed that the ex-wife of Vernon Roberts and her boyfriend, a wealthy neurosurgeon, had been taken into custody. Investigator Mark Hicks confirmed to the Post, a Cherokee County newspaper, that the